Glossary
Every term the courses use, defined in one line and then in a paragraph. Written to be read out of order.
Showing 7 of 24 matching “Server”
A program that is open for business.
A running program listening for requests and answering them. Not a piece of hardware: one machine can run several, and it stops being a server the moment the program exits. Your laptop runs one every time you start a dev command.
A function you call from the client that runs on the server.
Written like a normal function, but the build replaces the body with a network call in the client bundle and the real implementation only ever exists on the server. You get a typed contract for free and the server code never ships to the browser.
See also RPC, Validation, Secret
Data fetched from an API, held in the UI.
Not really your application’s state, but a cache of somebody else’s, which goes stale the moment anyone else changes it. Treating it as local state is what produces "I updated it but the list still shows the old value".
You ship a function; something else runs it.
The platform decides when to run your code, how many copies to run, and when to discard them. Costs nothing while idle, scales without thought, and gives you no persistent memory between requests.
See also Cold start, Stateless, Container
The server-side record that you are logged in.
A stored record the server looks up on each request using an id from a cookie. Slower than a signed token because of the lookup, but logging out is instant and reliable.
See also Cookie, JWT, Authentication
Data that can change.
The real question is never what the state is but where the authoritative copy lives: the server, the URL, component memory, or browser storage. Two copies of the same fact will eventually disagree.
See also Server state, Search params
Each request starts from nothing.
The server remembers nothing about you between requests by default. Memory has to be added deliberately, which is exactly what cookies and sessions are for.
See also HTTP, Session, Serverless